"Comrade Fidel Wants You"

Young Cubans carry on the revolution at home and abroad

President Carter has accused Moscow of using the Cubans as surrogates to interfere in "the internal affairs of Africa." Zbigniew Brzezinski has denounced the Cubans as "international marauders" who are doing the Kremlin's dirty work in the Third World. But Premier Fidel Castro's escalating military involvement in Africa has some homegrown and homefront benefits, as TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott discovered on an eleven-day visit to Cuba. His report:

Castro's famous beard is necked with gray. His green fatigues have been artfully tailored to all but conceal a midriff bulge. Cuba's "maximum leader" will turn 52 in August. He has ruled Cuba for 19 years. Fully 45% of his 9.7 million subjects were born after Fidel and his guerrilla band came down from the Sierra Maestra and marched triumphantly into Havana.

Cuba's population is young, but its revolution, like its leader, is facing middle age. Castro and his comrades are afraid that the youth, untested in struggle and cosseted by the socialist state, will grow up soft and complacent. Officials in Havana say frankly that one reason for sending young Cubans on what they call "internationalist missions" to Angola, Ethiopia and other embattled Third World countries is to give them a taste of the way their elders fought against the government troops of Dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s and against U.S.-backed invaders at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

Says Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, 65: "Compared to what my generation and Fidel's knew, life nowadays is easy, and this easiness may bring about a certain weakness." Then, getting in a dig at Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists, Rodriguez adds: "We don't believe in solving this problem with a cultural revolution, parading people around with dunce caps on their heads. We believe that internationalist tasks help the revolution because they are important in the political character-building and moral mobilization of our youth." Cuban propaganda on posters and radio broadcasts stresses youth--and youthful militancy.

"Young Cuba to the Barricades in the Fight against Neocolonialism and Oppression," proclaims a billboard on a highway east of Havana.

The government built four boarding schools for Angolan and Mozambican teen-agers on the Isle of Pines off the south coast of Cuba. At one of the schools, named after Angolan President Agostinho Neto, a class of uniformed children, many of them war orphans, greet "comrade visitors" by snapping to attention, giving a clenched-fist salute, and chanting: "Long live the Angolan Revolution!

We have survived our own Bay of Pigs in Africa. The struggle continues, the victory certain. Fatherland or death!" They march in military fashion from their classrooms to their dormitory, and from there to nearby citrus groves to pick grapefruit.

In addition to the four schools for Africans (a fifth, for Ethiopian children, is due to open soon), the island is dotted with boarding schools for 20,000 Cuban students; all these institutes combine an academic curriculum with manual labor and ideological training. Part of their educational program, says Roberto Ogando, a political leader on the island, is "to learn that as members of a controlled democracy they have an obligation to work --and if necessary even to fight--with their hands." In keeping with the Isle of Pines' conversion from an agricultural community (and prison colony) into a kind of incubator for Cuba's post-revolutionary generation, the local authorities want to change its name to the Isle of Youth.

In late July and early August, Havana will be host to 16,000 Communist and left-wing students from around the world (including 400 Americans) at a World Youth Festival dedicated to the theme of "anti-imperialist solidarity." Brigades of volunteers from the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, as Cuba's auxiliary political watchdog apparatus is called, are working six days a week to spruce up the capital for what promises to be a giant pep rally on behalf of national liberation movements--and, by implication, on behalf of Cuba's own policy of armed intervention in Africa. "We must be reminded from time to time that keeping our own revolution alive does not mean just study and consolidation," says Jesus Sais, a statistics major at the University of Havana. "It also means struggle and sacrifice for the sake of other people's revolutions."

Of the estimated 46,000 Cubans now in Africa, about 8,000 are civilians. Cuban doctors and paramedics provide much of the medical service in Angola and virtually all of it on the islands of Sao Tomeand Principe, a Democratic Republic that was once a Portuguese colony. There are Cuban engineering teams all over the continent. In Angola, nearly 800 Cuban teachers are running makeshift schools under the impressive banner of "The Che Guevara Internationalist Pedagogical Detachment." More Peace Corps than Afrika Korps, most of the teachers are barely out of secondary school themselves. Their average age is 19, and they are paid just 30 pesos (about $40) a month.

Cuban officials insist that both the civilian and military personnel in Africa are volunteers. Maybe so, but a young Cuban faces a formidable battery of social and governmental pressures to answer the call "Comrade Fidel wants you." A Havana resident described how authorities picked volunteers in the small town where a relative lives: "They lined up the young men and asked those who were willing to go to Africa to raise their hands. Anyone who didn't raise his hand was then told to explain why--and he better have a pretty good excuse, like illness or hardship in the family. Otherwise, he'd get a reputation for shirking his responsibilities. The vigilance subcommittee of the C.D.R. (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) would keep an especially close eye on him."

There are also more positive incentives.

"It is considered a great merit to have participated in an internationalist mission," says Filipe Suarez, 48, a C.D.R. official. "It is understood that someone who gives up a year or so of his life to help in Africa will be guaranteed his old job back." More to the point, many young Cubans, especially those with higher education, have difficulty finding work after they finish school, and they know a certificate of African service will help them on their return. Because of a postrevolutionary baby boom and the success of Castro's anti-illiteracy campaign, the Cuban job market is glutted. Concedes Minister of Education Jose Ramon Fernandez Alvarez: "We are educating more people than we have jobs for immediately. The reason is that the majority of those who are graduating today could not have gone to university at all before the revolution."

Nor is the Cuban army suffering from a shortage of recruits because of the African commitment. This year 100,000 Cuban males will turn 17, the age of military service. That is 30,000 more than 10 years ago.

The African involvement has offered Cuba a kind of safety valve for its burgeoning problem of youth unemployment.

The financial cost of that involvement is underwritten almost entirely by the Soviet Union (see box). And not just young men apply for African duty. Says Vilma Espin, 46, head of the Federation of Cuban Women and wife of Fidel's brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro: "At the height of the war in Angola, we had thousands of letters from women of all ages, including ones in their 70s, asking to go as cooks. One of the most important changes in Cuba since the revolution is that women who were afraid to go out of their houses 20 years ago are now requesting permission to go on internationalist missions."

Some Cuban cynics question the ideological purity of the applicants. Says one:

"Sure, there are a lot of people who are fascinated by the idea of going abroad, even if it's to fight. That's exciting, and life here is not exciting. It's also a way to get ahead when you come home. Africa is a ticket out of here and a good return-ticket home, too." Vice President Rodriguez admits that at first Cuba's civilian contingents abroad "looked like a kind of correctional institution, filled with delinquents, undesirables, homosexuals--even Jehovah's Witnesses. That was a distortion of our purpose. Some people falsified their papers or exchanged papers with their comrades so that they could go. Now we can pick and choose carefully, since we have no difficulty getting volunteers."

One reason is that while a tour in Africa is hardship duty, the odds are still good that a young Cuban will survive the experience. So far the number of Cuban soldiers who have died in Africa is relatively small. The exact statistics are secret, but a top Cuban official says that those killed number "only in the hundreds." Knowledgeable Western sources put the figure at 1,000 or slightly more.

In proportion to its population, Cuba has more of its sons--and daughters--in Africa fighting for international Marxism than the U.S. had fighting against that cause at the height of its involvement in Viet Nam. Yet to date, Cuban battlefield fatalities have been light compared to American losses in Viet Nam.

That situation could change drastically if Cuban troops were to be drawn into the civil war between the Ethiopian regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam and the well-armed secessionist rebels of Eritrea, or if Cuban units should find themselves in pitched battles against South African or Rhodesian army units. If the amount of Cuban blood spilled in Africa should increase dramatically, Castro might have to resort to officially conscripting soldiers for African duty. Privately, a number of Cuban officials admit that their routing of the Somali invaders of Ethiopia last spring was a walkover, but that there are no more easy victories in Africa. They also concede that while Castro and his legion of "internationalist fighters" may still be, by their lights, on solid ideological and military ground in Africa, they could be only a few false steps away from their own Viet Nam-like quagmire. -

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